I’m Not a F***ing Coach!

I’ve spent the past 4 years devoted to a life where I’ve called myself a coach, studied and practiced the art of coaching, studied and practice the art of selling myself as a coach, spent a lot of money on coaches, created a peer group around me filled with coaches, become heavily involved in communities of coaches, and on and on.

I reached out to a colleague of mine earlier this year to ask for referrals for a group coaching program I was putting together, and it seemed like somehow he intuited that I was not working with a coach (at the moment).

He said something to the effect of “As coaches we need to invest in hiring a coach in order to hold our clients through their process”.

I both do and don’t believe that this is true and I have some bullshit I could call on the rigid belief in that “principle”.

But the truer thing I didn’t say to him in that conversation (believing on some level that actual coaching was somehow more valuable or legitimate than the work I’d been called to devote myself to) was that I’d spent the past 6 months (and would go on to spend the NEXT 6 months) working weekly (and sometimes multiple times a week) with a therapist/healer/no-words-can-actually-describe-it doing incredibly deep work (and deeper work, in my judgement, than many or most coaches are willing/able to do).

EVERY single session we had together was the deepest work I’d ever done in my life.

EVERYTHING in my life has changed as a result of our work, but not a single time did she coach me.

Mostly we never talked. I simply felt.

From the first moment I entered her office she said nothing. No small talk. No “What would make this a life changing conversation”. Nothing except for the deepest presence I’d ever experienced in my life.

We sat in silence for a minute. Two. Three. The minutes kept counting. I noticed the impulses to speak what was running through my mind, but none of them felt deeply true, so I said nothing and brought my attention back into my body.

And then, after about 10 minutes, seemingly out of nowhere, I broke open.

I cried, deeply. I felt, deeply. There were a few words, but the words only served to crack me even more deeply open.

Nearly every single session we’ve done since then has followed this same trajectory.

She doesn’t ask questions or offer reframes or coach.

I don’t tap into my impossible dream or examine my thoughts or learn how to minimize activities that drain me of energy while augmenting activities that give me energy.

Even though she’s a therapist we don’t talk about the hard thing that happened this week nor the ex-girlfriend who I’m still carrying trauma around nor even my childhood relationship with my parents.

We sit in stillness, the deepest stillness I experience anywhere in my life, until the locked up emotions and traumas that have been RUNNING my life from underneath the surface become unlocked and begin to move through.

My only job in this space is to feel all of it. All of the trauma of loss, disconnection, misattunement, and the incredible impact of being an exquisitely sensitive boy and man who felt EVERYTHING. The love and the joy yes, but also the fear, pain, and trauma being transmitted right alongside it.

Early on I learned to close my heart to protect myself from all of the energy that was blasting through me. It was simply too much.

The reason none of my coaches had a fundamental impact in my life is because YOU CAN’T COACH at the consciousness of a 3 month old child who’s been injected with a vaccine and spent the next 6 hours screaming and screaming and terrified and in pain and being only able to feel that something is incredibly, incredibly wrong – being unable do to anything with the experience but lock it inside his baby body.

YOU CAN’T COACH from the consciousness of a 1 year old boy who felt it through his whole body and soul when his 8 week old baby brother died in his crib, and on top of that, felt his mother go into a deep depression and leave to go get a job because that was the only coping mechanism she could come up with.

YOU CAN’T COACH at the consciousness of a child who has been blasted through by the terror and deep psychic wounding of a maternal lineage full of acute, overt sexual abuse and trauma.

YOU CAN’T COACH at the level of generation upon generation of men with hardened hearts passing their silent suffering down to their baby boys, their young men, their sons of every age.

The essence of my deepest, most powerful personal work is 98% non-cognitive. It is about *allowing* my nervous system to open up to the deepest fear, trauma, emotional pain, and ultimately spiritual pain that has been locked up inside this shell of a body for most all of my life.

It is about releasing anything that is not my essence – accessing the third stage divine masculine through the third stage divine feminine of trauma release.

It is about cultivating an effortless, fluid, and completely intuitive relationship to my energetic and emotional expression.

It is about releasing everything that is NOT me, because what’s underneath doesn’t need a fucking coach. What’s underneath is a pure expression of God.

If you catch any flavors of anger in my expression here, it’s because I’M INCREDIBLY FUCKING ANGRY!

And underneath that anger is pain.

It has been so incredibly painful to be disconnected from my truest expression for so much of my life. I have felt what it is like to be so disconnected from my heart, so deeply empty, that I would rather kill myself than go on that way.

It has been incredibly painful to feel so much possibility – so much energy wanting to flow through me and make itself manifest in the world through my relationships and purpose work, yet to only have access to small drops of that flow.

It has cut me to my deepest soul to be consumed by the sense of my own disconnection from expression of the divine.

There are a lot of great things I’ve gotten from the coaching world and I incorporate them into my work on a regular basis.

But Adam Quiney, fuck you. I love you. There is something more true for me and it is more powerful and healing than being or hiring a coach ever will be. This is me owning my expression of God.

Rich Litvin, fuck you, I love you. Your being and frameworks are powerful and elegant and compelling and they are not me.

It’s taken a while to uncover this truth, and “fuck you” more honestly translates as “it has hurt”.

The reason I’m on this earth is to open people’s hearts, bodies, lives, relationships, and businesses up as channels for their fullest expression of the divine.

It is to “coach” beyond consciousness.

To heal at the level of personal, generational, and spiritual trauma.

To heal at the levels that our cognitive minds will never be able to access.

Coaches may complement the work that I do, and my work may complement theirs, but our work is very distinct and not the same thing.

Rumi sums my job (both personally and professionally) up beautifully: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

As leaders we light the way for others to follow similar paths as we’ve followed.

I feel that for the first time I’m truly tasting what I’m on this earth for.

I hunger to have a practice full of clients with whom I’m doing my not-coaching work. Clients who’s hearts, bodies, and souls are thirsting for what I consider THE bravest and most courageous work any of us will ever do: Cultivate uninhibited relationship to our emotional, primal, and ultimately spiritual landscape.

I see and feel it materializing in front of me.

I see and feel the impact I’m meant to have through my men’s work materializing in front of me. Not even through facilitating the work myself, but through the role of CEO and space holder. To invoke a powerful space for healing by inviting the perfect spokespeople, facilitators, and participants into that space.

I see and feel God opening up through me.

From this place the neediness for money or success or validation simply falls away.

It’s utterly beautiful and it brings me to tears not infrequently.

This is my path and this is my truest expression of my work.

I’m not a f***ing coach.

I’m something that has no words to define it – it is defined in the experience of each moment between myself and the person or people I am relating with.

I crave words to help describe it though. Partially from fear of “how will people get it?”

Partially because it’s true that the boxes we put people and things into help us know how to relate with them.

I’m a shaman.

I’m an energy worker.

I’m a healer.

Whatever though. The words have and will come in the right moments. The expression BEYOND words has and will continue to come in the right moments.

And at the essence of it all I guess I get to keep practicing what I’m here to learn and to teach.

To stay open. To be a channel. To listen and then to follow the calling.

To know myself as God and to know everyone and everything else as God as well.

To live as a Fuck-Warrior of Love.

To cut through the pain in my own heart and the hearts of those around me.

To surrender to the pain in my own heart and create a space for those around me to surrender to their own pain.

To channel the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine parts of myself and through that find integration, unity, and the pure, blissful knowing of God.